HI! my name is Ali - and this post is about why I became a nurse…also, I am trying to enter for the drawing for the tablet???Not sure how to do so but am going to post about why I became a nurse, with an excerpt from a journal I wrote while caring for my dying mother…I had been a phlebotomist for years with the underlying ambition to be an RN…never quite realized! But after my mother died, I became more determined than ever to fulfill my dream and eventually, I did!! While taking care of her and watching her die, I had no idea what I was doing - but I did know that many others went through this same pain and as a nurse, I could perhaps help family and patients…and thus the excerpt:
“Problem is, there’s a shortage of time now to write and, if there is time, there is no energy. Her hair is falling out with enthusiasm now. So fast is everything happening that it’s as if I’m watching a computerized aging film flipped over to fast forward. Her face has become saggy, baggy. It is no longer possible to watch all of this and so, decision made: different movies to be selected from now on. This one has the capacity to wind the gut into knots and to dilate all cerebral blood vessels into a headache I know is trying to kill me. My head hurts in the morning now too.
And still, the winter persists. Outside, that is. Inside is an insidious autumn. Hair gone deciduous, is falling out with each chance air current - upstairs, downstairs, especially in the shower, where it rains and rains and then rains some more. I cannot hold onto it for her, must quickly drop it in horror - or - find a way to put it back in. Somehow, this seems to be the worst of all. Perhaps because it is so visible, so external, so inexorable. Too indicative of a now undeniable process going on. But - this is MY MOTHER. We have been warned but heard the words as if they were intended for others. Certainly they were not for us. After all, we had done nothing particularly wrong.
She spoke again of China yesterday, of her childhood there. I must encourage more of this, must write it all down. Before it is too late. Why have we wasted so much time and why, even now, do we run around and around so. We don’t know how to stop long enough to listen to the pain.”